Recordings of lectures are perhaps the strongest point in elearning. It is possible to record the lectures and exercise sessions. We use iVocalize in the calculus course offered virtually at the University of Helsinki. The system allows all the participants to record all events in the class.

We are also using Adobe Captivate to prerecord lectures. During a lecture we simply ask students to listen the pre-recorded lecture. That is followed by a discussion, a pre-recorded set of sample solved problems. Finally the students are asked to answer questions using the WebALT MapleTA system.

The pre-recording using Captivate is great. The program empowers anybody to create high quality recorded presentations. Take a look at http://ubu.math.helsinki.fi:8080/Calculus/Calculus-2007/Chapters/100_Pre... to get an idea how we are teaching our students. The benefit of pre-recorded lectures is in the quality of the presentation. It is smoother, and, in the near future, these recorded monologues will be replaced by presentations involving several persons rather than just one lecturer.

All this is a fair amount of work. However, Captivate makes the editing of the recordings very easy. It is amazing what one can do with the audio file of a presentation with sweet programs like Captivate.

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